Remote IT Consulting FAQ

What does an IT consultant actually do?

For a business rather than a home user, the job is deciding what technology the business needs, in what order, and what it should cost — then making sure what gets built matches that. It is distinct from IT support, which is about keeping what already exists working. A consultant should be able to tell you what to stop spending money on, which is the test most fail.

How is this different from an IT support company?

Support answers the phone when something breaks. This is the layer above: architecture, security posture, recovery planning and the roadmap. We do not run a first-line helpdesk and there is no per-incident pricing. If you have a capable internal person who is simply out of hours, co-managed IT support is usually the cheaper answer than replacing them.

Do you work with clients outside South Africa?

Yes — most engagements are remote, and a good share of them are international. Identity, cloud tenancy, security policy, backup design and architecture are all configured through the same admin surfaces whether the consultant is upstairs or on another continent, so distance stops mattering once the working practices are right. We are based in Somerset West, South Africa, and work with clients across South Africa, the UK and Europe.

What timezone are you in, and will that be a problem?

SAST, UTC+2. That is the same working day as Central Europe, one to two hours ahead of the UK, and it leaves a genuine afternoon overlap with the US East Coast. For UK and European clients it means a shared working day rather than a handover note waiting each morning. For the Americas and Asia-Pacific the overlap is narrower and we say so up front — cover outside our working day is a scope decision with a price attached, not something to assume.

Do you ever come on site?

Across the Helderberg — Somerset West, Strand, Gordon's Bay — plus Stellenbosch and the eastern side of greater Cape Town, yes, at no extra cost. What genuinely benefits from a visit is the first assessment of anything with cabling, a comms room or a site-to-site link, and the handover at the end of a migration. Elsewhere that part is either handled by someone local under our direction or scoped as travel, and it comes up less often than people expect.

What does an engagement cost?

Any number quoted before someone has looked at the estate is a guess dressed as a quote, so we do not publish rates. What moves the price is predictable: the number of users and sites, how much documentation already exists, out-of-hours expectations and regulatory exposure. An estate with a maintained inventory costs measurably less to support than one without. Discovery is scoped as its own fixed piece of work ending in a written plan and a real number.

What happens in the first engagement?

A bounded assessment producing three documents: a documented estate, a prioritised risk list, and a costed plan. You keep all three regardless of what you decide next, including taking them to another provider. An assessment that only has value if you also buy the implementation is a sales exercise, and it produces different advice.

Do you resell hardware, licences or security products?

No. We have no financial interest in the connectivity, hardware, cloud licensing or security tooling we recommend, which is the reason independent vendor review works at all. The one exception we state openly: we build and run our own business software, so where one of those is genuinely the right answer we will say so and you should discount it accordingly.

Will our tenancy, domains and documentation stay ours?

Yes, and it is worth insisting on this with any provider. Licences, domains and cloud tenancies registered to your organisation rather than to us, and documentation exportable in a form you can actually use. If the only record of your environment lives in a provider's tenant, leaving is expensive by design. This is the most common form of lock-in in the industry and it is entirely avoidable at the start.

Can you help with POPIA compliance?

The technical half of it, which is the part that lands on whoever runs the systems: knowing where personal information lives, controlling who can reach it, and being able to detect and evidence an incident. We are not lawyers and the governance half — appointing an Information Officer, drafting policies — needs legal input. Where we touch systems holding personal information we are an operator in POPIA terms, which requires a written contract in both directions.

What size of business is this for?

The common thread is not headcount — it is that a bad day costs real money and someone has worked out that hoping is not a plan. Typically professional firms, finance and legal practices, engineering and manufacturing businesses, medical practices, and SMEs growing faster than their IT was designed for. It suits you less well if what you want is a cheap break-fix number to call.

How quickly can you start?

The first conversation is a scoping call rather than a sales call: what you are running, what is forcing the change, and what the deadline is. An assessment can usually begin within a week or two of that. If there is a hard vendor deadline driving it, say so on the first call — it changes the sequencing more than anything else.